9. Image in Distress? The death of Meleager on Roman sarcophagi

Abstract

The recent interest in Roman mythological sarcophagi has been fuelled by their potential to throw light on the ideas and ideals that governed Roman social life and behaviour. In particular, sarcophagi offer genuine insight into Roman approaches to Greek myths as a device for producing meanings related to the context of death, to rituals at the tomb, and to strategies of commemoration in general. This perspective has been opened by moving away from approaches prevalent in the later nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, which concentrated on matters of iconography, the relationship between depicted scenes and literary or philosophical texts, and on how the reliefs on Roman sarcophagi could be used to provide insight into the Greek originals which they allegedly copied. The most pressing current questions for our understanding of mythological sarcophagi include asking how life and particular lives may be plotted not only against the narratives of myth but particularly against myths borrowed from a different culture: to what extent do mythological reliefs on sarcophagi represent a miraculous or supernatural narrative and to what extent can they be understood as representing or reflecting on the everyday? Can one establish the general devices by which either of these two areas of signification is generated within Roman images or signalled for Roman viewers, and can one trace the ways these characteristics play out in any one image? Can certain periods of production or themes within mythological imagery in Roman culture be distinguished by the way in which this relationship between the mythological and the everyday is defined or re-enacted? Ruth Bielfeldt has recently demonstrated that one answer previously given to these questions, an answer opting for historical development as explanation,